Blog #2 My Writing Instruction

Writing has been my solace and an outlet for as long as I can remember.   As a writer I have had very unique experiences as far as my instruction.  Throughout my career, it has been a mix of formulaic instruction (ugh, grammar books!) and creative.

Growing up in Vermont, we were lucky to have a lot of artists in residence who would work in our schools for short periods of time working on writing with us.  In school I met authors, poets and songwriters.  Through them and my teachers too, I learned a lot about the craft of writing.  In fourth grade, Vermont author David Budbill came to my school.  At the time I was in a tiny school that had only 30 students from grades 4-8.  He spent a month with us working on crafting fiction pieces.  We had read one of his books as a class so for me it was like meeting a legend.  After his stay, we bound our books of stories and to this day I still have mine. 

As I got older, my instruction became much more formulaic and prescribed.  In 8^th grade, I had a teacher who hated how I wrote.  For me it was probably the most miserable time of my life – mostly because every paper got turned back to me with a lot of corrections to be made.  It was the only time that my mom, a teacher, ever took my side in parent teacher conferences!   This teacher thought my writing was too flowery and did not appreciate or like my independent voice at all.  My mom said that she didn’t have to like it, it was my voice and it was how I wrote and she needed to learn how to respect our differences.  My teacher was not amused.  I entered the state poetry contest that year and of all of the students in the state who entered, I got an honorable mention, flowery writing and all!

In high school, my creative writing endeavors got relegated to notes and poetry.  I spent much more of my time learning formal writing processes.  When I was a freshman, I almost failed English!  It was a steep learning curve from elementary to high school as far as academic English was concerned.  Looking back now I realize I had the worst teacher I could have possibly had that year and most likely would have done much better had this teacher had any teaching experience and spent more time guiding us through the writing process instead of just expecting us to already know it.

University brought whole new challenges to my writing.  I attended school in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Although they speak English there, it is the Queen’s English and man oh man did I have to relearn how to spell.  To this day I spell travelling with two l’s and recognise with and s.  And don’t even get me started on ‘our’ words!  My biggest challenge at this time actually came when I began writing in Spanish.  When I started college, I had just come from a year of living in Mexico.  My oral Spanish was very strong after a year of speaking it daily.  However, I had yet to learn to write much more than a few words.  Spelling in Spanish is very easy though because the words are written just like they sound.  But, accents and syntax were totally lost on me.  I struggled to master these skills, again with a professor who thought I should know all of these things if I was going to be in such a high level Spanish class. 

Of course, my instruction was not your usual experience – but for the most part it was authentic and meaningful and filled with lessons that I take with me know as a writer.  Writing has always been easy for me so it is something that I have enjoyed (minus the grammar books!).  Because of my experiences learning to read and write in different languages, I can also understand how hard and frustrating writing can be.

Blog 3: Reading and Oral Language Connections

Strong oral language, including vocabulary skills, generally means better reading skills.  Oral language is like the warm-up for a bigger game, an introduction into the complex world of language, syntax and grammar of the English language.  Without a strong foundation in these skills, reading will undoubtedly be so much harder.  

In previous classes, we focused on the important role that strong oral language development plays for students as they learn how to read.  By understanding that each letter or group of letters makes a sound and that these sounds and symbols make up meaningful units.  The connections between oral language, reading and writing are so inextricably entwined.  Students need strong oral language skills as the foundation of their reading.

Gibbons states that “a group task should require, not simply encourage talk.” (p. 22).  As teachers I feel like we need to be more mindful about creating authentic situations where our students can practice language. 

Working in a school that has such a high population of English language learners, I worry that our students often don’t get enough time to practice language they are learning in school.  Instead, and we are all guilty of this, we let them slip back into their own languages when they are working together.  While I know how much value there is in kids being able to clarify concepts speaking in their own language, I just worry that there are not better guidelines or structure to this oral language and kids just come to rely on always having things explained to them in their own language.  As someone who has learned a couple of different languages, I know that I learned best when I was forced to use the language I was learning.

Oral language and chances to practice oral language are such an important part of school.  In schools students get to practice language that they might not get to practice at home.  As teachers I think we need to be mindful that we provide our students lots of opportunities to practice language in our classrooms.

Blog 1: Literacy Philosophy

When choosing a teacher to discuss literacy with, only one person came to mind.  Call me biased, but my mom is the best literacy teacher that I have ever met.  Sure, she is my mom and she was my second grade teacher and she is the most amazing literacy teacher I have ever met.  When I asked her about using her as an exemplar for this blog, her answer was “there are people so much better than me”.  

My mom was a teacher in rural Vermont in the late 60’s until she became a principal in the mid 1990’s.  She started what was basically a one room schoolhouse in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.  When we talk about this and the way education is today, she talks a lot about differentiation and how when she taught in Waterford, she had no choice but to differentiate for students.  Her philosophy that all students could and should be successful in reading and writing came from those roots.

She also believes that all children should have access to good literature.  I remember being very angry at her when she took all of my books to school.   She is a huge proponent that teachers need to know their literature and find that book that will hook the reader and drag them into a book.  Fourth grade boys should not be given Junie B Jones books.  She believes that classics are great –but just because they had the legend of being great didn’t make them appropriate or good for all readers.  In fact, she was an avid believer that the wrong books would turn a reader off.   We have had many discussions lately about how my stepsister has insisted on reading both the entire Chronicles of Narnia and L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series to my niece who is 7.  Sure, both are great works of literature but I can’t imagine having to sit through them at that age!

When she became a principal, her commitment to literacy didn’t change.  Up until the day she retired, she still sprinkled reading dust on her students and dared them to read a certain number of books every year in return for her dressing up in a pink tutu and kissing a pig.  She brought in authors to her schools and made sure that children were exposed to as much authentic reading and writing experiences as she could.  I have never met an administrator of the same caliber as my mother.  Yes, I am biased but having worked with 9 different principals now, I realize, she was one in a million.  She got kids.  She had teachers send kids to her office to read to her – not just because they were naughty.  She made reading and discovery a priority in her school – not just the state test.  And because of it, her student’s scores doubled in the time she was a principal – without added seat time or constant remediation.  

My mom knew and understood that in order for kids to excel in reading, they had to find the joy and purpose in it.  I’ll never forget in second grade her reading aloud Bunnicula with all of the lights in our basement classroom turned off and just an overhead projector casting light.  She understood kids and understood that roping them into literature meant making it interesting and irresistible.

I chose my mom because so many teachers I work with have either never had this passion about reading or don’t fully understand what it is to know literature inside and out.  That is a failing of our teacher education system in many ways.  We spend so much time getting teachers prepared to close gaps and teach to the test (a necessary evil in this society) that we forget who our clientele are – children.  We forget to read aloud, and when we do, we don’t use voices.  

Although my mom retired about 6 years ago, her philosophy isn’t out of date.  Every day I try to take a little piece of her energy and enthusiasm for reading with me to school and every day when I talk to her on the phone, I tell her about a student who read to me or had a great a-ha moment that day and finally got something they were struggling with and I hope she knows how much of a role she played in their moments of success.

Welcome

This is my new blog for a class at Regis University in Denver, CO. Stay tuned for more!